Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

His heart thumped. He walked faster, the carpet muffling his footsteps so his approach was silent. Not that he was intending to sneak up on her, though.

Several of the desk drawers were ajar, he saw.

All but the bottom one, which he kept locked. They were open just a bit, as if they’d been open and then shut hastily.

And he knew he hadn’t done it. He rarely used the desk drawers, and when he did, he was meticulous about closing them all the way, otherwise the desk looked sloppy.

She was sitting back in his black leather Symbiosis chair, writing on a yellow legal pad.

“Cassie.”

She jumped, let out a shriek. “Oh, my God! Don’t ever do that!” She put a hand across her breasts.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Oh — God. I was in my own world. No, I should apologize — I shouldn’t be in here. I guess I’m just a low-boundaries gal.”

“That’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

She seemed instantly aware of the drawers that had been left slightly ajar and began pushing them all the way closed. “I was looking for a pad and a pen,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“I had this idea, and I had to write it down right away — that happens to me.”

“Idea?”

“Just... just something I want to write. Someday, if I ever get my shit together.”

“Fiction?”

“Oh, no. Nonfiction. Too much fiction in my life. I hope you don’t mind my coming over tonight. I did call, you know, but Marta said you were at work, and Lucas and I got to talking, and he said he was busting his head over some poem. Which turns out to be one of the poems I actually know something about. So I...”

“Hey,” Nick said. “You’re doing God’s work. I’m afraid my arrival broke things up.”

“He’s going to write the first few paragraphs of his poetry term paper. See where it’s heading.”

“You’re good with him,” Nick said. You’re amazing, is what he thought.

Maybe that’s all it was. She came over to help him figure out some Robert Frost poem.

“You ever teach?”

“I told you,” Cassie said. “I’ve pretty much done everything.” The pinpoint ceiling lights caught her hair, made it sparkle. She looked waiflike, still, but her skin wasn’t so transparent. She looked healthier. The dark smudges beneath her eyes were gone. “‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be / Some good perhaps to some one in the world.’”

“Come again?”

Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a line from Death of the Hired Man . It’s a poem about home. About family, really.”

“And the true meaning of Christmas?”

“You Conovers,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I have a few ideas,” Nick said, attempting a leer. “God, you’re good at everything, aren’t you?”

“Coming from you ? The alpha male? Jock of all trades?”

“I wish. I may be the most math-challenged CEO in the country.”

“Is there a sport you can’t do?”

He thought a moment. “Never learned to ride a horse.”

“Horseshoes?”

“That’s not a sport.”

“Archery, I bet.”

“I’m okay.”

“Shooting?”

He went dead inside. After a split second, he gave a small shake of his head, looking perplexed. For a second his eyes went out of focus.

“You know,” she said. “Target shooting, whatever it’s called. On the range.”

“Nope,” he said, hearing the studied casualness in his voice as if from a distance. He lowered himself onto a rush-seated Windsor chair that invariably threatened to leave splinters in his backside. Laura had banished his favorite old leather club chair when they moved. Frat house furniture, she called it. He rubbed his eyes, trying to conceal the flush of terror. “Sorry, I’m just wiped out. Long day.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not now. Sorry. I mean, thanks, but another time. I’d rather talk about anything else than work.”

“Can I make you dinner?”

“You cook?”

“No,” she admitted with a quick laugh. “You’ve had one of my three specialties. But I’m sure Marta left something for you in that haunted kitchen of yours.”

“Haunted?”

“Oh yeah. I met your contractor right when I got here, and I got the lowdown from him.”

“Like why it’s taking his guys forever to put in a kitchen counter?”

“Don’t blame them. You’re driving them crazy, is what I hear. He can’t get signoffs when they need them. Things like that.”

“Too many goddamn decisions. I don’t really have the time for it. And I don’t want to get it wrong.”

“‘Wrong’ defined as what?”

Nick was quiet for a moment. “Laura had very definite ideas of what she wanted.”

“And you want everything to be just the way she’d planned. Like it’s your memorial to her.”

“Please don’t do the shrink thing.”

“But maybe you’re afraid to finish it too, because when it’s over, something else is over too.”

“Cassie, can we change the subject?”

“So it’s like Penelope, in the Odyssey . She weaves a shroud during the day, and unravels it at night. That way it’s never finished. She staves off the suitors, and honors the departed Odysseus.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Nick took a deep breath.

“I think you do.”

“Except, you know, it’s reached a point where I really do want the damn thing finished already. It was her big project, and, okay, maybe as long as it was under way, it was like she was still at work. Which doesn’t make any sense, but still. Thing is, now I just want the plastic draft sheets out of here, and I want the Dumpster gone, and the trucks, and all that. I want this to be a goddamn home . Not a project. Not a thing in process. Just a place where the Conovers live.” A beat. “Whatever’s left of them.”

“I get it,” she said. “So why don’t you take me out to dinner somewhere?” A smile hovered around her lips. “A date.”

They walked through the Grand Fenwick Hotel parking lot holding hands. It was a cool, cloudless night, and the stars twinkled. Cassie stopped for a moment before they reached the porte cochere and looked up.

“You know, when I was six or seven, my best friend, Marcy Stroup, told me that every star was really the soul of someone who’d died.”

Nick grunted.

“I didn’t believe it either. Then in school we learned that each star is actually a ball of fire, and some of them probably have solar systems of their own. I remember when they taught us in school about how stars die, how in just a few thousandths of a second a star’s core would collapse and the whole star would blow up — a great supernova followed by nothingness. And I started to cry. Right there at my desk in sixth grade. Crazy, huh? That night I was talking to my daddy about it, and he said that was just the way of the universe. That people die, and stars die too — they have to, to make room for new ones.”

“Huh.”

“Daddy said if no one ever died, there’d be no room on the planet for the babies being born. He said if nothing ever came to an end, nothing could ever begin. He said it was the same way in the heavens — that sometimes a world has to come to an end so that new ones can be born.” She squeezed his hand. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

The lobby of the Grand Fenwick was carpeted in what was meant to suggest an old-fashioned English broadloom, with lots of oversized leather furniture arranged in clubby “conversation pits,” like a dozen living rooms stitched together. Velvet ropes on stanchions partitioned the restaurant from the lobby. The menu offered fifties favorites like duck à l’orange and salmon hollandaise, but mainly what it offered were steaks, for old-school types who knew the names for the different cuts: Delmonico, porterhouse, Kansas City strip. The place smelled like cigars, and not especially expensive ones; the smoke had seeped into everything like dressing on a salad.